Playwright: Alice Childress. At: ETA Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave.
Tickets: 773-752-3955; www.etacreativearts.org; $30. Runs through: March 3
The average playgoer, asked to list successful African-American playwrights (pre-August Wilson), will likely name Lorraine Hansberry and then surrender the challenge. Alice Childressa Southern-born high school dropout who found her home in Harlem's American Negro Theatrewrote plays significant for their commentary on both racial and gender issues, but that are only now emerging from the shadow of her glamorous contemporary. Following Artistic Home's 2011 production of the Obie-winning Trouble In Mind (the first to be awarded a female writer), ETA presents a double bill of one-act Childress plays, Florence and Wine In The Wilderness.
Florence opens on Mrs. Whitney, waiting in the colored section of a railroad depotthis is 1949for the train taking her to New York City for the purpose of persuading her daughter to abandon hopes of a career as an actress. Mrs. Carter, speaking from the other side of the room's literal racial divide, concurs heartily with the mother's pessimism regarding her child's chances for success, even offering to find the latter employmentas a domestic servant.
Wine in the Wilderness locates us in the mid-1960s, where Afrocentric artist Bill Jameson is searching for a model to complete his triptycha female embodying the slatternly dregs of his tribe. His likewise cosmopolitan chums, Cynthia and Sonny-Man, introduce him to a waif displaced by the recent riots who seems precisely the type of loser he seeks, but Miss Tommy Marie Fields turns out to be far more than she appears.
It would have been easy for this production to engage in hindsight mockery, endowing our white matron with a cornpone accent, or caricaturing the urban hipsters and their now-outdated ideas. Director Mignon McPherson Stewart rejects these stereotypes, however, instead adhering to the respective zeitgeists of the eras under scrutiny. Bill may pontificate about "the trouble with our women," or Cynthia support then-fashionable social theories exhorting "matriarchal" Black women to be more subservient (lest they emasculate their menfolk), but Tommy's sharp-tongued rebuke is not meant to humiliate, but to enlighten. Maybe you can't fix stupid, but you can fix ignorance.
That includes ours, too. Theatergoers (like me) who came up through academe during the years Childress depicts are justifiably appalled at the lack of recognition allotted this intelligent, insightful, articulate voice for so many decades. The trek to ETA's Arts Center in Grand Crossing is a small price to pay in service of alleviating this error.